Samsung Canada plants flag on Great Northern Way

Samsung will be the first tech giant to raise a banner over Great Northern Way, an expanding node in Vancouver’s booming technology sector.

The Korean maker of smartphones, TVs and a plethora of internet-connected devices will move its Burnaby development centre to the top floor of a new building near the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and the Centre for Digital Media (CDM), and for a reason.

“We just see it as a growing centre,” said Tom Duggan, lead of Samsung Canada’s Metro Vancouver facility. “Mount Pleasant, and that location. We see more people moving there, so it is an opportunity for collaboration.”

Samsung, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate, has 275,000 employees worldwide in just its electronics division alone, which produces the world’s top-selling Galaxy family of smartphones that run on Google’s Android operating system.

Samsung’s Metro research and development centre is small by comparison, but develops software primarily for its mobile-phone platform and primarily on applications for companies doing business among themselves, so called business-to-business, Duggan said. Samsung smartphone-users familiar with Samsung Knox or Samsung Pay — those are a couple of key programs being developed in Vancouver.

But Samsung is outgrowing its existing location in Burnaby, having expanded to 100 employees from 15 when it first opened in 2013, and Duggan said the firm was drawn to Great Northern Way as much for its proximity to Emily Carr and the CDM as its accessibility via transit.

Duggan said Samsung landed in Metro because of the talented technology graduates that its post-secondary-education institutions generate and as its operations continue to expand, wants to stay tapped into the talent pool, but closer to downtown.

“I’ve been (in Vancouver) for over 20 years and I’ve seen the growth,” Duggan said. “That’s the opportunity. Samsung wants always to have the best talent, and there is great talent here.”

Besides its work developing software for mobile-phone applications, Duggan said his group also works on software for Internet-of-things applications and software for internet-connected smart devices such as TVs or refrigerators. He added that Samsung’s programmers and engineers regularly collaborate with local universities, something the company wants to expand on in its new home.

“We have been very fortunate to have established successful partnerships with the local universities through the co-op/intern placement programs with UBC and SFU,” Duggan said. “We are hopeful to see similar exciting collaborations come to fruition with Emily Carr University and CDM.”

And the CDM’s director of industry relations is eagerly awaiting Samsung’s arrival in the neighbourhood, which should be around June.

“I totally understand Tom’s interest,” said CDM’s Dennis Chenard. “It’s a central location, it has good transit options, but ultimately the talent needs and possible collaborations, it’s all right there. And they have an enthusiastic Android-user in me.”

CDM, jointly run by Simon Fraser University, the University of B.C., Emily Carr and the B.C. Institute of Technology, offers a unique masters-of-digital-media degree whose graduates have been in demand across the tech sector. And Chenard added that the vision for developing the CDM and Emily Carr on the site, the former home of heavy-equipment dealer Finning, was to attract a community of like-minded firms with shared purposes.

“The idea was to have the right mix of tenants and industry and students on-site that are all going to benefit from that same shared location,” Chenard said.

Joining Samsung in the new building at 565 Great Northern Way will be the game studio Blackbird Interactive and Finning International’s digital division.

To date, Chenard said the CDM has collaborated on research and development projects for companies such as the Japanese video-game studio Namco Bandai, among other firms, which is something it can offer to Samsung.

Emily Carr, in its industrial-design program, is building expertise in user-interface and user-experience elements of technology design, Chenard said, which will also be useful to the tech giant.

And while Samsung’s operation is relatively small, compared with firms such as Amazon, which is working on expanding its Vancouver operations to 2,000 employees, its move to Great Northern Way is a big deal to the Vancouver Economic Commission (VEC).

“Samsung’s presence there … is the first name-brand, global-technology company in that neighbourhood,” said Sean Elbe, technology-sector development manager for the commission. “So it is significant.”

The City of Vancouver, in its land-use plan for the False Creek Flats (produced jointly with the VEC), is counting on Great Northern Way becoming “a critical driver of the innovation economy,” attracting more tenants in digital media and information technology.

And Elbe said that in terms of building its brand in Vancouver, having its name emblazoned on a location closer to downtown will work better for Samsung than having a sign on a building in a nondescript business park next to an empty field.

“In terms of the type of folks driving along Great Northern Way, going to Emily Carr, visiting the B.C. Tech Hub or bringing their kids to Science World, (that) is going to be a significant boost to their brand and ability to attract the talent they need to grow their presence in Vancouver,” Elbe said.

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